Chapter 18 Jude
JUDE
For a moment, I can’t move. She just bolted. Right when I was going to tell her why things are so complicated with me.
Right after she kissed me, and I pushed her away. I physically smack my hand against my forehead. “Fucking idiot,” I say out loud. “Stupid Jude being fucking stupid.”
Go after her, idiot!
I know Nora. I know she doesn’t take risks, but it seems like she’s trying to change that. And I let her crash and burn.
I reach our rooms and knock gently on her door. “Nora?”
Nothing, not even the sound of movement. Would she even tell me to fuck off if she was there?
I give her a minute as I go into my room, then knock on the inside door. “Nora, please, let me explain? I swear it’s not that I didn’t want you to kiss me.”
This time I do hear rustling on the other side of the door, and I hold my breath, waiting for her to open it.
But she doesn’t. And after knocking, and then texting, both with no response, I start to get frustrated. She needs to give me a chance to explain, doesn’t she?
After last night, I know I’m the one in the wrong, but this stubborn little boy part of me is mad she won’t let me talk to her.
Out in the hallway, I bang on her door again. “Nora, goddammit, please let me explain.”
“She is not home,” a voice says. I whirl to see our bellboy from last night, Gunther. He’s strolling down the hallway like he doesn’t have a fucking care in the world.
For a moment, I panic. Was that rustling I heard her packing her bags? Did she leave?
“How do you know that?”
“I see her that way, in robe.”
Relief washes through me. She’s still here. “Sir, is everything okay?”
“Peachy, Gunther!” I yell, but I’m already breaking out in a run.
I spend 50% of my waking hours in a hotel, so I know the lay of the land. I follow the signs in the lobby and am down at the pool in five minutes flat. I’m sweating my ass off from racing around the warm hallways in a winter parka, but I hardly notice.
I open the door to the pool, walking fast through the men’s change room to abject stares.
I know I look insane, in my boots and coat, especially when it’s dong-city in here, but I don’t care.
I emerge onto the pool deck, scanning the water for her.
It’s huge; twice the size of the pool back home at the Rolling Hills. “Nora!” I yell.
There are a few heads bobbing around in the pool, and a family over in the kid’s area. Everyone turns to look at me. She’s not here.
“Sorry. As you were.” I wave.
It takes me another five minutes to find the spa thanks to the labyrinth of hallways that aren’t laid out the way they should be. By the time I get to reception, I’m soaked through and starting to feel slightly dizzy.
I grip the counter like it’s a life buoy. “Woman. Red hair. Glasses. Is she here?”
The woman at the desk’s eyes are like dinner plates. “Sir, are you—can I help you take off your coat—”
It’s approximately one thousand degrees in here but I don’t care. I need to see Nora. All I can see is her face, looking horrified as I pushed her away.
“Sorry, can’t wait.” I run past her, toward the signs leading to the steam rooms. “Sir!” she cries, but I don’t stop.
All the steam rooms are arranged around a central space with lounge chairs looking out past a cold plunge pool and onto the ski hill. It’s not quite as elaborate as ours but it’s still big.
I open the first door, peering inside. There’s one guy in a speedo.
I open the next door, then the next. Nora’s not in any of the rooms. I’m beginning to lose hope when I finally open door number seven and there she is, sitting in a cloud of steam at the back of the room.
She’s wearing the same prim-looking red bathing suit with little frills over the top and butt she’s had forever.
“Nora!” I say, gasping. The room spins a little, but I’m so relieved I barely notice.
“Jude?”
I close the distance between us and get down on my knees so I’m eye level with her. I have to brace myself on the bench, my arms bracketing her legs. This might be sexy if I didn’t feel so fucking woozy.
“You ran out,” I pant, “before I could explain.”
Nora’s staring at me with her eyes wide. She’s not wearing her glasses, I realize. Of course not, they’d get all fogged up in here. The fur from my coat’s hood, I notice vaguely, is sticking to my cheek. Or is that my hair?
“You pushed me away,” she says, folding her arms. “What did you expect?”
“I haven’t touched a woman in seven…almost eight years, Nora.”
Her mouth hangs open. “That’s not true.”
“It is true.”
“You’ve dated—”
“I went on a couple of dates.” I’m breathing like a dog now, gasping almost between sentences. “I didn’t do anything with those women, Nora. We didn’t even kiss.”
“Why?”
“When—” I take a breath, suddenly swaying. I finally clue in that I need to shed some of this gear. When I take my arms off the bench I nearly fall. Between the fog and her lack of eyeglasses I don’t think she can see me, but she’s frowning at my movements.
“Jude, are you okay?”
“When I played…the championships…I didn’t…
” I swallow, trying to stay upright as I aim my fingers at my coat’s zipper.
“I didn’t have sex with anyone. It was the only thing that kept me sane under that pressure.
Kept me focused. All I cared about was winning.
I thought maybe it isn’t for me? Then knee, and lots of sex, and… ”
Shit, I’m not making sense. I’m trying to tell her I went to a dark place after my injury. I started having sex with anyone who offered. It didn’t last long, and it felt like shit, but I could barely remember any of it through the haze of painkillers and booze.
I grasp the bench again, giving up on my coat. “Farrah, I couldn’t remember her, and she was…” The world fades a little. Fucking finish, Jude. “She had a baby.”
Can she hear my shame through my puffy-feeling lips?
Because it’s the greatest shame of my life.
That I can’t remember sleeping with the woman who had my son.
Worse, I’d hoped, for a moment back then, that Cap wasn’t mine.
I’d insisted on a paternity test, which showed he was.
It also showed me Farrah’s age for the first time.
She was eighteen. My math told me she’d only just turned eighteen when we slept together. I’d thrown up after that.
In my delirium, I suddenly picture that old TV talk show, the host holding up the results of the test. Jude, you are the asshole!
“It was all my fault, Nora.”
“Jude—”
Nora puts a hand on my shoulder, then gasps. “Jude, you’re still in your coat?”
“She left. Nora. She left. I had a baby and no fucking clue how to handle it. I didn’t, I can’t touch, no sex after that.”
“Jude…are you telling me you’re celibate?” She whispers that last word.
“A priest,” I say.
I lift my hands to make a praying symbol, a bad, unfunny, delirious joke.
Then I feel myself toppling. The couple sitting on the adjacent bench, their faces agog, are the last thing I remember before the room turns upside down.
“Jude!”
The voice is distant at first, but I know it’s my Nora.
I reach up and tug my hair. It hurts, but her voice continues. “Jude!”
My eyes flutter, and when I open them, Nora’s face is the first thing I see. She’s wearing her glasses, and her eyes are slanted in concern and relief. “Oh God, Jude! What the hell!”
She stands up. The light behind her is so bright for a moment, I have to squint.
“I think he’s okay,” she says to someone out of my line of sight. I lift my head up. I’m in a medical-looking office. The resort’s clinic room, just like we have at home. I drop my head back down.
“Sir,” a man’s voice says. He appears beside me, a middle-aged man with neatly combed gray-blond hair who looks sternly at me. “I’m the house nurse. You have heard of heat stroke?”
I groan.
“It’s why you fainted.”
I blink open my eyes. “I didn’t faint. I passed out.”
“There is no difference.”
“There’s a big difference!”
“Thank you, nurse,” Nora says.
He gives instructions to see him after I feel well enough to walk, then thrusts a bottle of water at Nora. “Have him drink this, and do not enter the spa with your parka on, sir.”
“I think he thinks I’m stupid,” I say, when he leaves the room.
“Maybe you were this one time,” Nora says. “What were you thinking?”
I sit up and the room spins only a little. “I’m fine, by the way.”
“I know. But I guess we’re even for that little head bonk in the library.”
I smile. She does too, but it fades quickly.
“Nora, I’m sorry. I needed to tell you what was going on before you thought anything was wrong.”
Nora folds her arms. She’s still in her bathing suit, and when her breasts squish together, my dick twitches. He’s the real idiot.
“Have you really not been with a woman in almost eight years?”
“Really,” I say.
“Do you think Cap would want you to punish yourself endlessly for having him?”
My stomach does a full roll at that. Leave it to her to get right to the point.
“I told you a long time ago I’m not cut out for relationships, Nora. It was just easiest if I cut out the other part too.”
She looks at me for so long I wonder if she’s seen right through me. If me not having sex was yet another of my ideas everyone else would think I was an idiot for coming up with.
“What would happen if you had sex again?” she asks.
I’m surprised by this question. But her eyes are on mine, and of course all I can think about is her, on the edge of the tub, coming so hard for me.
My dick swells further. “I don’t know.” That’s the truth.
“Have you sworn yourself off sex for life?”
“I don’t know,” I repeat, dumbly.
Nora pulls her lips into a straight line, then says, “Okay. Well, it’s your choice.” Then she spins on her heel, heading for the door.
“No!” I say, jumping off the table. “Don’t walk out on me again, Nora. Please.”
She spins back around. “What was last night, Jude?”
Heat swirls in my belly. I can’t say I don’t know again, not only because she’d storm out for sure, but because it’s not true.
This room is tiny. I’m close to her now, only a foot away.
And only a little dizzy. But not too dizzy to take a step.
“It was you, Nora. If you think I don’t think about sex with you, you’re dead fucking wrong.
You know what I did after I left your room last night?
I didn’t even make it two steps before my dick was in my hand.
I thought about your face while you came and imagined it was me making you feel that way.
That it was my tongue on you, making you scream my name. That good enough for you?”
Nora’s eyes are wide, her lips parted. I can hear her breathing. I can see the pulse at her throat going off.
“I want you, Nora, and it’s confusing as fuck.”
“Then show me, Jude. I dare you.”
I lean in. “Don’t test me. You won’t win.”
I wait half a beat for her to protest, but all she does is let out this sexy little moan as I press her up against the wall.
I grasp the back of her neck in my hand and press my lips to hers.
I stroke her tongue with mine, pressing myself against her so she can feel how much I want her.
Fire roars through me, my need so deep I can’t think. I can’t rationalize what I’m doing.
I glide my free hand down her neck, her collarbone, the damp fabric of her suit between her breasts.
I want so badly to slide my hand between her legs, to see if she’s wet for me.
But at the last minute logic gasps a breath, making me slide my hand sideways.
I dip my fingers under her hip cutout instead, pulling her suit out and releasing it to snap against her skin.
It’s enough to break my focus at least long enough to back away.
“I want you, Nora, okay? And I’m a fuckload of fun in bed. In case you’re wondering.”
Then I lift her out of the way and walk out the door before I give in and show her exactly what I mean.